Character Designer For Yooka-Laylee Explains Why There Is A Decline In 3D Platformers

There’s no denying that the amount of good quality of 3D Platformers we get nowadays is nothing like what we got to enjoy a decade or so ago. There are some obvious exceptions to this rule however and it looks like Yooka-Laylee may be shaping up to be a good contender in the field. Character Designer, Steve Mayles, spoke to GodIsAGeek and provided his take on the reasoning to why we don’t see as many of these types of games as we used to:

GodIsAGeek: We could be seeing a comeback for the genre, with A Hat In Time, Crash Bandicoot Remastered and Yooka-Laylee. Why do you think this style of game died off?

Mayles: I think the market got very saturated in the late 90s with 3D stuff. As soon as we could do 3D, a lot of people did those sort of free-roaming open world platformers. There was a lot of them about. I think people got a little bit fed up with them. And also with the new technology coming in, new hardware that can do better graphics, people were eager to show that off – developers were eager to show that off – with a more realistic product that didn’t really fit in the cartoony world of the 3D platformer. For us, absence makes the heart grow fonder. If we tried this 10 years ago, we wouldn’t have got the response. But there has been that gap for so long that people have been crying out for another 3D platformer.

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Published by NintenMau5

20 comments

I think expense and time comes down to it, too. The idea behind console gaming for the last 15 years has been ‘just because you can invest the time, effort and money, doesn’t mean you necessarily should’.

I still wish they would have gone this way with Donkey Kong Country instead of making the same 2d game we had 20+ years ago. That said I didn’t like donkey kong for the n64 as much as Banjo Kazooi so something did feel wrong about it.

I do remember it was a pain to play sometimes and thats pretty much my only memory of it. Than again games are way to easy these days, I remember dying 6 times tops during a full clear of Mario Galaxy.

That’s when DK64 went downhill for me, too. I hated those retro games & they ruined the pace of the rest of the game. Yeah, it’s probably blasphemous to some others but… I. Hated. The. Original. Donkey. Kong. That Jetpak game or whatever wasn’t any better.

Online gaming did change allot for me indeed specially World of Warcraft and later on all the other Blizzard games and ofcourse FIFA and Call of Duty.

Since I started playing online the only single player games I actually finished are Mario Galaxy 1, Zelda Skyward Sword, Bloodborne and GTA 4. I rescently took a step back from online gaming besides Hearthstone and some games of Battlefield 1 to get back into single player games starting with Bloodborne.

I probally still got 40 games I bought and never played or didn’t finish lol. That changing now though.

For me I just think the name yooka Laylee is stupid. I hate the actual instrument sound (ukelele is the token hipster instrument) and graphics look like Spyro Enter the Dragonfly on the Gamecube. Cringe.

there was no way Nintendo was ever going to invest in anything remotely 3D for Donkey Kong in the Wii U era. I believe development on Retro’s fabled ‘new franchise’ was shelved at the last minute in favour of a HD iteration of DKC. I remember a lot of fans were disappointed by that. But think about 2D Yoshi and Kirby titles that looked pretty immense but were probably very cheap to develop.
Hopefully if the Switch takes off, we’ll see a bit of a renaissance for the sort of first party, 3D platformers we know and love